I'd say Next.js is the opposite of a "batteries included" framework. No abstractions for ORM, background jobs, sending emails, managing attachments, web socket communication - all very basic stuff when dealing with a production application.
From the first page of Next.js docs: "Next.js is a React framework for building full-stack web applications"
> You don't need to worry about compiling, routing, code splitting, etc
IMO that's the least you'd expect from a web framework.
Meanwhile.. last I checked you still had to choose how you were going to roll your own auth in rails. Are people not often just installing bcrypt and adding a users table with their password hash? Or is there a generator for all that now?
Anyway, I disagree with the idea that Next is Rails-like. Adonis is probably still the closest in the JS/node ecosystem, though Redwood might also serve a similar niche for the types of apps it works for.
Next and the other "frontend metaframeworks" (as they're called now), are certainly much closer than the most popular choices 7 or 8 years ago (often cobbling together React and Express and an ORM like Prisma, making a bunch of other decisions, and then doing a bunch of the integration work by hand)
Also Rails only recently got authentication. For more than a decade you needed Devise or something else.
* not comparable to Rails or Django’s definition of “a while” but it’s quite mature.
You get much out of the box with Rails 8 now like deployment, caching, job queue, Hotwire, Turbo Frames and mobile.